I got a Dreamcast well into its decline, and I was blown away by the quality of the software. It was the true successor to the N64, in terms of a delivering end-to-end quality. I remember Shenmue, Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis, and Soul Caliber as being nearly as immersive as arcade games games of the era. It was the last video game system I played to any significant degree. A truly underrated platform.
I got one on launch day; I had bypassed the Saturn as a teen, but everything about the Dreamcast screamed "this is your next console". I had as much fun trying to run GNU/Linux and NetBSD on it as I did playing games. And yes, it was as close as one could get to the Sega Arcade experience at home.
Collecting Dreamcast hardware and games is still affordable - compared to, say, SNES games (which can get pretty pricey if you insist on having them CIB).
The beauty of the DC is that you can get all regions work on an unmodified (as in hardware) Console using a DC-X bootdisk and the games are as close to their arcade counterparts as they can get...
I'm sure I'll pick one up one day soon. There is an independent (as in not Gamestop) used game store near me, and they always have a few on the shelf. If I do I'll try to track down a VGA converter for it so I can do higher resolution on the games that supported it.
The reason I say I wish I still had mine, though, is purely nostalgic. Like I said, I bought it on launch day, and it worked perfectly to the day my ex-wife took it and all my games in the divorce. It's probably in a landfill somewhere now.
